His utterances on the occasion of the Greek war of liberation prove that, in spite of his reactionary ardour, he had too much sense to believe, like Adam Müller and the rest, in the principle of legitimacy and the divine right of kings as revealed truths. He had written to Müller in 1818: "You are the only man in Germany of whom I say: He writes divinely when he chooses; and nothing in our audacious days astonishes and exasperates me more than the audacity of those who dare to measure themselves with you.... Your system is a completed, rounded whole. It would be vain to attack it from any side. One can only be entirely in it or entirely outside of it. If you can prove to us, make comprehensible to us, that all real knowledge, all true understanding of nature, all good laws and social regulations, nay, even history itself (as you somewhere assert), are, and can only be, communicated to us by divine revelation, then (as far as I am concerned at least) you have gained the day. As long as you do not succeed in doing this, we stand afar off, admire you, love you, but are separated from you by an impassable gulf." It must be remembered that Adam Müller had gone the length of asserting that the existence of the Holy Trinity sufficiently proves that any national economical system based upon one single principle must be a wrong system. It even proves to him the necessity of the "Dreifelderwirthschaft" (triennal rotation of crops). Now, when Greece revolts, Gentz writes that the principle of legitimacy, being the production of time, must be modified by time, and makes the following noteworthy assertion: "I have always been aware that, in spite of the majesty and power of my employers, and in spite of all the single victories gained by us, the spirit of the times would in the long-run prove stronger than we are; that the press, contemptible as it is in its excesses, would prove its superiority to all our wisdom; and that neither diplomatic art nor violence would be able to hold back the wheel of the world." In his sixty-fifth year, the worn-out, gouty, suffering old man was taken possession of by two passions strangely out of keeping with his age and the bent of his mind. It was a momentary return of youth. The one was for the famous ballet-dancer, Fanny Elsler, at that time a girl of nineteen. His infatuation for her knew no bounds. He writes: "I have won her simply and solely by the magic power of my love. Until she knew me she did not know that such love existed.... Think of the bliss of daily undisturbed intercourse with a being whose every attribute enraptures me ... in whose eyes, and hands, and every separate charm I can absorb myself for hours, whose voice bewitches me, and with whom I can carry on endless conversations; for I am educating her with fatherly solicitude, and she is the aptest of pupils, a pupil who is at once my beloved and my child."